We provide an introduction to optimal fiscal and monetary policy using the primal approach to optimal taxation. We use this approach to address how fiscal and monetary policy should be set over the long run and over the business cycle. We find four substantive lessons for policymaking: Capital...

The Stability and Growth Pact has become a primary fiscal policy framework in all European countries since 1997. Together with Maastricht fiscal criteria it determines the fiscal discipline of integration process. The aim of this study is to evaluate ex-post effectiveness of the fiscal rules...

The Czech Republic is going to face ageing of its population. It will affect the economy in many ways. The pension system is one of them. This paper provides a view on possibilities how to insure long-term stability of the pension system in the Czech Republic using a mix of pay-as-you-go and...

This paper studies whether the dynamic behavior of real GDP, unemployment and inflation is systematically affected by the timing of elections and by changes of governments in the Czech Republic. Two basic models of political cycles are tested – the political business cycle models and the...

The coordination of the economic policies of the EU Member countries started in the early 90´ s has become a permanent feature of the European integration process. Gradually a rather complicated mechanism has evolved aiming to combine and complement policies pursued at EU level with policies...

The publication Privatization without Capital consists of three studies linked by an institutional view on selected issues of the Czech economic transformation. In the first paper, Karel Kouba presents the theoretical background of liberalization stabilization and privatization policies in...

For a long time during the twentieth century the mainstream economists and economic historians dealt with prevailing theory of basic difference between Herbert Hoover and Franklin Delano Roosevelt policies concerning to the Great depression. Nowadays, this contrast does not seem to be so...

Keynes foreword to the German edition of his General Theory is one of the causes of the association between his name and a total state. This paper looks into how justified the link between Keynes's theory and the Nazi German economic policy really is. The first part introduces Keynes's ideas on...

As regards the frequently mentioned risks connected with the EU entry, we feel that the analyzed macroeconomic data do not confi rm that these risks have materialized. The example of the Czech Republic, which joined the EU in 2004, conversely points to an improvement of most macroeconomic...